Meh

Couldn't resist the urge to try some fair isle knitting again - this time fingerless mitts. I like Mary Jane Mucklestone's fair isle mitts and after a survey of my scraps of yarn I settled for the Muckle mitts.

My yarn is Merino De Luxe, 50% wool 50% acrylic, DPNS 3.25 mm.
The project is fun and quick, but the initial drive left me after I finished the first mitt. I just don't like it. The yarn is kind of wrong, the combination of dark brown and beige is drab, but most of all the palm part is too tight. I love my mitts to fit, but this mitt is almost like a bandage :).
I also have to work on my needle transitions, because there are still small ladders between the stitches, held on different needles. I don't have this issue when knitting in only one color.

 

And I'm not crazy about the thumb. This kind of construction is not quite ergonomic, as the human palm is not constructed like that, with the thumb sticking out of the palm, so there's some pulling and stretching, and the fact, that the mitt is pretty narrow anyway doesn't help.

But fair isle mitts are so cute, that I might try them again in different yarn and color.

Skull & Bones

Pattern: Skull Hat
Yarn: Alize Superlana Classic black and white
Needle: 3 mm
Time to knit: 2 days

Though I've been knitting for years now, I had always avoided fair isle. I've done some colorwork knitting, sure, striping and supercomplicated intarsia with 17 or more balls running simultaneously (teenage madness!), but no fair isle so far. Well, the time has come to grow up and enter the world of mature knitters.
It's a good thing that for my first fair isle project I chose a hat with only 13 rows of actual stranded knitting - I found it messy and slow. The final result is interesting and hubby and son are fighting whose the hat is actually :). I suppose the big boy will get the hat and the small boy - the wrist warmer, into which I turned the sample of the pattern I knit initially.
This is also my first double hat - first I knit the internal simple hat (with provisional cast on) bottom-up, and then the stranded twin, again bottom-up. I could have opted for a continuous process top-bottom-top, but I don't like knitting hats top to bottom.